in dates, irregular participles, algebraic symbols,
chemical formulas, the altitudes of mountains, and the areas of inland
seas. To the cruelty of the too earnest enthusiast she added the cruelty
of youth, and it was with a merciless justice that she judged everyone
with whom she came into opposition.

'But, my dear, you'll be ill if you keep on like this. And you know what
your father said.'

Rose smiled, bitterly superior, at the misguided creature whose horizons
were bounded by domesticity on one side and by dress on the other.

'I shall not be ill, mother,' she said firmly, sniffing at the scent in
the room. 'I can't help it. I must work at my chemistry again to-night.
Father knows perfectly well that chemistry is my weak point. I must
work. I just came in to tell you.'

She departed slowly, as it were daring her mother to protest further.

Leonora sighed, overpowered by a feeling of impotence. What could she
do, what could any person do, when challenged by an individuality at
once so harsh and so impassioned? She finished her toilette with minute
care, but she had lost her pleasure in it. The sense of the contrariety
of things deepened in her. She looked round the circle of her
environment and saw hope and gladness nowhere. John's affairs were
perhaps running more smoothly, but who could tell? The shameful fact
that the house was mortgaged remained always with her. And she was
intimately conscious of a soilure, a moral stain, as the result of her
recent contacts with the man of business in her husband. Why had she not
been able to keep femininely aloof from those puzzling and repellent
matters, ignorant of them, innocent of them? And Ethel, too! Twelve days
of the office had culminated for Ethel in a slight illness, which Doctor
Hawley described as lack of tone. Her father had said airily that she
must resume her clerkship in due season, but the entire household well
knew that she would not do so, and that the experiment was one of the
failures which invariably followed John's interference in domestic
concerns. As for Milly's housekeeping, it was an admitted absurdity.
Millicent had lived of late solely for the opera, and John resented any
preoccupation which detached the girls' interest from their home. When
Ethel recovered in the nick of time to attend the final rehearsals, he
grew sarcastic, and irrelevantly made cutting remarks about the letter
from Paris which Ethel had never translated and which she thou